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Was there a civilization on Earth before humans?

• briga 8y ago
  Ants are a good candidate for a second civilization. They live on every continent except Antarctica, they build complex structures, they invented argriculture millions of years before humans did (!), and they live in socially stratified societies. But I guess it ultimately comes down to your definition of what is a civilization. If we were to find evidence of an industrial civilization before humans we might not even recognize it as evidence, given how different it might be from ours.
  • mabbo 8y ago
    > they live in socially stratified societies This is gross anthropomorphism. Ants don't have societies any more than the cells in our body have societies. An ant colony is an organism. Each individual ant has just enough neurons to do the one task that ant does. The overall organism is quite capable, true, but it's not intelligent. It doesn't learn novel things, it doesn't purposely invent, it doesn't 'know' anything. Ants may take over the world some day, but they won't know it.
    • platz 8y ago
      Can ants form a boltzmann brain?
      • aalleavitch 8y ago
        They basically are one.
    • 3131s 8y ago
      Ants pass the mirror test, which is something very few animals are capable of.
      • aalleavitch 8y ago
        Wait really? Do you have a source for this, I'd love to learn more.
        • ahakki 8y ago
          No source, but iirc the scientists applied a colored dot on the ants head. When they saw themselves in the mirror the started trying to remove it from their heads.
          • dogma1138 8y ago
            There are parasitic mites that attach themselves to ants and they look like a colored dot (usually red). I think the ant “thinking” that the dot was a mite is a much more plausible explanation than the that the ant is some how conscious with its cluster of like 3 and a half neurons
            • zzbzq 8y ago
              Seems like the point was the mirror caused the response
            • yaks_hairbrush 8y ago
              So the ant (allegedly -- I'm eagerly awaiting that source!) saw a dot on the ant in the mirror, and tried to remove the dot on its own forehead. The key point: that looks an awful lot like the identification of the self with the reflected image. The issue you brought up about the mite is a bit orthogonal to this point. I can give you that the ant was concerned about the possibility of having a mite, and the point still remains that the ant thought it was on its own head only on basis of a reflected image of itself. (Compare to the alternative behavior: the ant tries to get the mite off the reflected image, never making any attempt to remove it from itself.)
              • ahakki 8y ago
                it was on hn a while back. the link is dead now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14146776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14146776 it’s on wikipedia, with the same dead source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test?wprov=sfti1 EDIT: Working link to the paper (in some journal of science): https://www.udocz.com/read/are-ants-capable-of-self-recognition-pdf https://www.udocz.com/read/are-ants-capable-of-self-recognit... http://difusion.ulb.ac.be/vufind/Record/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/219269/Details http://difusion.ulb.ac.be/vufind/Record/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot....
    • scandox 8y ago
      Bruce Sterling’s story Swarm has a brilliant take on the collective that doesn’t have intelligence. Won’t spoil it by saying more but your comment brought it instantly to mind...
    • Zaheer 8y ago
      If it doesn't invent / learn novel things, how did it learn the one task that it does today? Where does the leap from nothing to knowledge of that one task come in?
      • ItsMe000001 8y ago
        Mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, selection. The forces of evolution. Oh and lots of time and a huge amount of luck (not even ants can exist on Venus or Mars), but "luck" is just another word for selection bias, or looking backwards in time. > Where does the leap from nothing to knowledge of that one task come in? There is no sudden leap, only a huuuuuuuge number of tiny steps and lots of complexity of interactions.
    • psyc 8y ago
      Such absolute statements are a reflection of your personality as much as your world view. I'd take the opposite view of all of this. That your body is a society, and society is an organism. You think the gp is anthropomorphizing. I think you're exhibiting species chauvinism, setting prejudiced goalposts.
      • 3131s 8y ago
        You're right actually. There were a lot of absolute statements being made, most of them contrary to what the actual evidence is. Ants pass the mirror test with flying colors -- 30 out of 30 scratched a colored dot off their heads when presented with a mirror, but did not if the dot was the color of their skin. The ants didn't do this when presented with a clear pane of glass with other painted ants behind it. The ants are able to pass the test a few days after birth, but not in infancy. From what I understand, the current thinking is that the ratio of brain mass to overall body size is much more predictive of intelligence than brain mass by itself. And there are odd cases too in humans like an individual with a severe case of hydrocephaly, with 95% percent of his cranial cavity filled with fluid pushing his brain matter to the sides of his skull, and this individual exhibited very high intelligence and majored in mathematics. There is a lot not known about the brain and animal intelligence, and I would not be surprised if we continue to find out amazing things about ants. I recommend an older book called "Ants at Work" by Deborah Gordon to get an idea of the complexity of ant behavior.
        • Zuider 8y ago
          There was a case of a French man who suffered from extreme hydrocephaly. He lived a normal life, despite an IQ of 75, was married with two children, and held a career as a civil servant. “It is hard for me [to say] exactly the percentage of reduction of the brain, since we did not use software to measure its volume. But visually, it is more than a 50 to 75 per cent reduction,” says Lionel Feuillet, a neurologist at the Mediterranean University in Marseille, France. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-b...
    • cema 8y ago
      I think you are fighting a metaphor with another metaphor. Saying that ants form a society indeed implies assigning them human characteristics (anthropomorphism) but saying that they are neurons basically suggests that there are common models to represent an ant colony as well as a neural system. Frankly, I am not sure that the latter approach is more helpful.
  • tmalsburg2 8y ago
    Doesn't the fact that ants have already adapted to all kinds of environments suggests that they don't need to evolve civilization (whatever that is) in order to be successful?
  • runarberg 8y ago
    Well many millions of years ago there was no Antarctica. Perhaps a civilization came about when there was only one continent, which has happened a few times throughout the earths history. Why would a civilization even be terrestrial, wouldn't an ocean living civilization be even more likely? Why does a civilization need to invent agriculture. Perhaps ever evolving hunting technics or even just a sudden massive change in diet could free up enough time for a mass population of a species to start concentrating their efforts on cross societal constructions. I'm not saying that there was an ancient aquatic civilization of squids that mutated plankton to swim to their mouths. But if we want to ask such an extraordinary question, we must not limit our self in such a way that it makes it easier to deny it.
    • jobigoud 8y ago
      > Why would a civilization even be terrestrial, wouldn't an ocean living civilization be even more likely? There's a book about this, can't remember the name right now. Basically it looks at very ancient maps of the Antartica that have details that we only figured out in the 20th century with equipement allowing us to see through the ice layers. The book posits that there was a rather advanced civilization living before the last glaciation. It also posits that all the massive flooding mythology found in most human religions is actually stories transmitted by survivors of the previous era.
      • alcover 8y ago
        Barjavel - La Nuit des Temps ?
        • yoda_sl 8y ago
          Funny I just posted about it... the English name is “The Ice people”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Barjavel_novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Barjavel_nov... And yes a great sci-fi book, even so the civilization in question is just 900,000 years old not multi millions like the original article.
        • jobigoud 8y ago
  • madza 8y ago
    Premise of a novel by Clifford D. Simak. Good read.
  • drdeadringer 8y ago
    Ants can also count.
  • cpeterso 8y ago
    The Hellstrom Chronicle is a 1971 pseudo-documentary about the threat of insects, due to their adaptability and rapid reproduction, to humanity. It won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It's available on Netflix DVD and YouTube. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellstrom_Chronicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellstrom_Chronicle
• jngreenlee 8y ago
  The lizards...and some say they still are with us! /s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain
• amriksohata 8y ago
  On a side, Hindus believe in 4 Yuga's or phases that go around and round in circles, we are in the fourth one at the moment. Humans exist in all Yuga's and there is then a mahayuga after which there is destruction
  • dahidahi1 8y ago
    After that destruction, the cycle starts all over again. It is the closest thing to evolution formulated by the Indian rishis (scientists of their time). It begins with (on a high level) the water based living beings (fish), amphibians (turtle), mammal (boar), neanderthal (Parashuram), the perfect humans (Ram & Krishna) and so on. It is quite interesting. Another name for Hinduism is Sanatana Dharma - or the Eternal Way of Life.
    • yantrams 8y ago
      > scientists of their time Please don't masquerade mythologocal saints/yogis as scientists. You are doing a disservice to the accomplishments of real historical figures like Panini, Brahmagupta etc by making statements like this. You don't have to resort to mythological characters to feel good about the supposed glorious past. I can understand how the tales of Dasavataras can possibly have some allegorical references to evolution but claiming the rishis to be scientists only serves to further ridiculous beliefs like Quantum Mechanics and Relativity originated from Vedas, Rishi scientists developed nuclear weapons in 10000 BC etc. The main purpose they(Puranas (post-vedic Hindu mythology)) served was to legitimize the Vishnu cult, get rid of the pantheon of older Vedic gods (Indra etc.) and to counter the rise of Buddhism. Most of these stories were made up ad hoc to suit the purposes of their times. I find them quite clever to be honest and fascinating from literary and sociological perspectives. Take Buddha for example. Once Buddhism and its crusade against animal slaughter / rituals became a hit with the masses and started competing with Brahmanism/Sanatan Dharma/Hinduism, Buddha was made an incarnation of Vishnu and added to the Purana bloatware, while simultaneously obliterating Buddhist monasteries and driving it out of the subcontinent.
      • amriksohata 8y ago
• asmithmd1 8y ago
  The fact that we found pressurized oil reservoirs ("gusher" oil wells) means that nothing had tapped these cheap and easy sources of energy before.
  • zorked 8y ago
    Or we took it from the lizardmen who put it there for storage :)
  • seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Those could have arisen after the last civilization collapsed....beck it could even been are not of their collapse.
  • slfnflctd 8y ago
    Possible counterpoints-- they were much smaller, their minds/values/pursuits were different from ours, they had access to easier & better energy sources for their needs, or they died out due to something unexpected before they got that far.
    • cleansy 8y ago
      This reminded me of Dwarf Fortress. Digging greedily and deeply through the Z layers until..
  • codingdave 8y ago
    Or that prior civilizations had enough forethought to not even start burning oil for energy.
  • golergka 8y ago
    Or that may be they had some other sources, even cheaper and easier, that we don't know of anymore because they used them all.
  • kolinko 8y ago
    Perhaps they tapped to the biggest ones, and developed better tech before they had to get to the smaller ones?
• antonvs 8y ago
  Betteridge's Law says no. But it's fun to think about.
  • ajross 8y ago
    Heh, this is a rare situation where this doesn't apply. The point to the leading question in the title is clearly not to refute it, it's to point out the idea that we can't refute it as well as everyone expects. The point is more "Yeah, there's no evidence for this. But if there was, it would be very easy to miss."
    • antonvs 8y ago
      > Heh, this is a rare situation where this doesn't apply. The law states, "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." Presumably you're a believer in the lizardmen.
• ganzuul 8y ago
  Would be fun to find artifacts on the moon.
  • alxlaz 8y ago
    I've read about such events and I am a little concerned about their unfolding along with the quickened pace of development in the AI field. If any artifacts are discovered on the moon, I sure as hell ain't boarding anything called Discovery One, ever.
• peatmoss 8y ago
  This is one of my all-time favorite “what if” questions. Some years ago a friend of mine coily posed this same question to me: What does humankind make that would survive 60 million years into the future, and if some other advanced industrial civilization had existed 60 million years ago, how would we know? It turns out my friend had put a LOT of thought into this exact question. Enough to do a masters in geology, his work ultimately making it into a high profile journal with writeups in places like the NY Times. He started talking to various geologists about what might survive as telltale markers of our civilization. Buildings or structures of any sort? Ha! Statues and monuments? Maybe we’d notice the odd deposit or two of minerals. After going through a long list of candidates, he settled on carbon cenospheres. These are little balls of carbon almost exclusively made in internal combustion engines as the result of aerosolizing fossil fuels. Sixty million years ago, our love of the ICE will show up in the fossil record as a light dusting of cenospheres covering the earth—contemporaneous with massive numbers of species going extinct due to mankind’s other influence. And as my friend was telling me his story, this is where my hair stood on end. Sixty million years ago we see a massive species extinction... and a light dusting of carbon cenospheres covering the globe. But we also see unnatural levels of iridium at the same point. And, while it’s hypothetically possible some industrial civilization was mining iridium and blanketing the globe with it, it’s more probable that the iridium was delivered by an asteroid. But how would you know? So my friend, as part of his research, went taking samples of his cenospheres from around the globe. What he found was interesting: namely, the further one gets from the Yucatan (where scientists had already validated there was an asteroid strike), the cenospheres get smaller. The big heavy ones precipitated out of the air closest to the Yucatan asteroid strike. Hardly likely to be coincidence. So much for ancient civilization this time around. However, his work rewrote a critical understanding of the KT asteroid extinction event. Namely, we previously thought most of the carbon at the KT boundary was the result of giant forest fires ignited by the strike. However we now know that the strike must have aerosolized massive oil fields under the Yucatan at that time and set them ablaze. Not a bad contribution to science starting from a sci-fi premise!
  • ianai 8y ago
    He’s not too far off what this article suggests as a marker of civilization in the past. But they have positives! “Fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the planet’s average temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above what we experience today. It was a world almost without ice, as typical summer temperatures at the poles reached close to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Looking at the isotopic record from the PETM, scientists see both carbon and oxygen isotope ratios spiking in exactly the way we expect to see in the Anthropocene record. There are also other events like the PETM in the Earth’s history that show traces like our hypothetical Anthropocene signal. These include an event a few million years after the PETM dubbed the Eocene Layers of Mysterious Origin, and massive events in the Cretaceous that left the ocean without oxygen for many millennia (or even longer).”
• hapnin 8y ago
  "It’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don’t support." We should all do this at least once. What a great practice.
• isthatart 8y ago
  An older period: Carboniferous [0] Lots of plastic non biodegradable (at the moment): lignin. That's why we have coal, which fueled our Industrial Revolution :) Ended with the Carboniferous rainforest collapse, caused by climate change. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
• 21 8y ago
  The article asks about detecting an industrial level civilization. But what about a former civilization which only rose to the level of the Roman Empire lets say? Could we detect that?
  • newsbinator 8y ago
    There may be a goldilocks period for detecting civilizations: Too early and they never industrialized at scale, so there's little to detect. Too late and they became a stage n civilisation and are now the substrate of our universe, so there's nothing to detect.
    • aalleavitch 8y ago
      They Sublimed, Culture-universe style.
  • Theodores 8y ago
    What about wicker? I imagine there to be a whole world of archaeology out there we miss because everything bio-degraded. If you navigated by river and set up a society based on fishing from the river then you might make everything out of wood, with wicker being the material of choice for seats and other furniture. Such a society could be very sophisticated, as per the people that lived in the Amazon before the white man diseases killed them all for the forest to return to apparently virgin rainforest by the time the white guys got there. So there is your scenario to detect, how would you look out for such a society that had no need for big stone structures? Rivers used to be clear and full of fish, able to service a river dwelling human culture for as long as there are fish. If farming happens the river is no longer clear or full of fish, so a recession of sorts hits rather than some big defining event.
  • cbHXBY1D 8y ago
    Human historical record only goes back ~6,000 years but modern humans have existed for at least ~200,000 years. We don't have historic records of the stone age, but we do have lots of archaeological evidence. And what we have found are Paleolithic stone tools, temporary camps, and some permanent settlements around 12,000 years ago. Nothing close to anything resembling the Roman Empire.
• brandonmenc 8y ago
  An underrated sci-fi book based on this premise is Toolmaker Koan by John C. McLoughlin.
  • Wildgoose 8y ago
    Author of "The Helix and the Sword"? Just ordered a copy.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• zw123456 8y ago
  We left some evidence of our existence on the moon so the next civilization will be able to find that even millions of years from now, perhaps.
  • anoncoward778 8y ago
    The American flag is already bleached out. All that is needed is something to remove and disturb the other items left on the surface of the moon, say one or two good asteroid/meteorite strikes We pass across meteorite showers on a constant consistent basis. That evidence wont last 1000 years let alone 60 million
  • koboll 8y ago
    Does LIDAR penetrate dust? I wonder what we might find if we scanned the entire Moon...
    • c22 8y ago
      We have LIDAR scans of most of the moon. https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2110.html https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2... https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/clementine.html https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/clementine.html https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experimentDisplay.do?id=1994-004A-04 https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experimentDisplay.do?id=1994... https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120012916.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201200...
    • ryl00 8y ago
      Maybe a monolith? ;)
• mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Theres a cool ST Voyager episode about this, the species gets labeled the Saurians. They are extremely powerful and dogmatic, due to living in space for millions of years.
• ajmurmann 8y ago
  I wish this article had also gone into how long indicators might survive outside of Earth. Could satellites survive? Things on moon or Mars? Might we go to Mars and find some old Mars Rover or underground base or that we left Mars for Earth after we made it uninhabitable? Edit: typo has -> had
  • mr_toad 8y ago
    Anything on the surface will be eroded by micometeorites over millions of years. The lunar surface is a layer of dust several meters thick that is the product of that erosion. Underground artefacts might survive longer, since there is no plate tectonics and little other geological activity, but finding them would be difficult.
• givan 8y ago
  We don't even know about previous human civilizations. Recently discovered Göbekli Tepehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe, the oldest megalith structure, confirmed by radiocarbon tests to be more than 12.000 years old with massive stone pillars and 3d relief stone sculptures mostly still buried is still a mystery to science and some "scientists" still think hunter-gatherers built it with stone chisels. The interesting thing is that a study based on the drawings on the structure correlated with Younger Dryas period might explain why nothing was found about the ancient civilization that built it. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-ancient-stone-pillars-clues-comet.html https://phys.org/news/2017-04-ancient-stone-pillars-clues-co... https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128512-ancient-carvings-show-comet-hit-earth-and-triggered-mini-ice-age/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128512-ancient-carving... So after all the Atlantis and the flood myth found in most cultures from around the world might be real.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • thaumaturgy 8y ago
    > ...and some "scientists" still think hunter-gatherers built it with stone chisels. Well yes, that's how actual scientists work: on evidence. Until there's evidence to the contrary, the most likely hypothesis is that the structures were built with the tools and labor that we think humans possessed at the time. I didn't find anything in your links that mentioned the myth of Atlantis.
    • Alex3917 8y ago
      > I didn't find anything in your links that mentioned the myth of Atlantis. Do a YouTube search for Younger Dryas.
      • thaumaturgy 8y ago
        You're kidding, right? I'm getting Joe Rogan podcasts, channels like "Atlantis in the Java Sea", "Joe Rogan University" (...). I'm not watching any of that shit. I feel dumber just for knowing that "Joe Rogan University" exists. Point me towards something that isn't part of the Kook Productions Network please.
• babalulu 8y ago
  This reminds me of Lovecraft. His mythos was based on the premise that Earth has been inhabited by a series of alien and native civilizations, mostly malign, over the past billion years. Occasionally an artifact or part of a city is thrust to the surface by geologic forces. According to Lovecraft, after humanity falls a race of intelligent beetles will arise.
  • krapp 8y ago
    I think Lovecraft's aliens were more indifferent to humans than malign, or at best slightly annoyed, the way a human might be by a small anthill in their yard. As far as I know, Lovecraft hated the theistic ideal of humanity being the "center of God's creation" and wanted to portray a universe where humans were utterly insignificant and incapable of dealing with the scale of horrors that awaited beyond the safety of the anthill.
• Robotbeat 8y ago
  I imagine we’d find a LOT of stone tools before the civilization developed higher tools and then collapsed. Africa is littered with them deep in some areas (due to a million years of humans), and they’re on all continents but Antarctica.
• interfixus 8y ago
  Surely, we'll leave a few satellites in high orbit, and presumably the raptors would have done as well. Also, their sitcoms would by now have penetrated a decent bit of intergalactic space, and attracted some attention. Because if it happened twice on this planet, the universe at large would be teeming hi-tech societies.
  • palunon 8y ago
    Or not. Maybe the apparition of multicellular life is super rare, but once it has happened hi-tech societies are common.
• Joeri 8y ago
  There’s a book series by julian may that deals with a time travel device being invented to 6 million years ago where to everyone’s surprise an alien civilization is ruling the planet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Pliocene_Exile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Pliocene_Exile
• ownedthx 8y ago
  My all time favorite theory: http://pbfcomics.com/comics/dinosaur-meteors/ http://pbfcomics.com/comics/dinosaur-meteors/
• spraak 8y ago
  A very interesting and difficult part of these kinds of questions is that what we look for has to be very carefully considered. If we look for just what we know now, we might not find the evidence, even if it's there. One of my favorite examples of this is radio waves. Try telling someone in the 1600s about them; it seems unlikely they'd believe you--but yet they've existed forever (?) and e.g. lightning and other natural forces can generate them.
• alcover 8y ago
  "Ski boots are the worst. Solid plastic. They'll be around till the sun goes supernova." - Douglas Coupland, Generation X
• louithethrid 8y ago
  Maybe it was a illegal civilization and the plate tectonics swallowed the evidence?
• dustfinger 8y ago
  As the article points out, an ancient industrial civilization would need to mine resources. I think it is fair to say that they would mine a lot of gold and silver for use in electronics. If such a civilization existed then one would think that most of the earth's natural veins of gold and silver would have been mined making large easy to find naturally occurring veins rare. It seems though that our civilization has found plenty of easy to find large scale veins of gold and silver. Does that not make it unlikely that any ancient industrial civilization lasting centuries could have existed before us? Or over tens of millions of years would more naturally occurring easy to find veins of gold and silver rise to the surface of the Earth's crust?
  • leetcrew 8y ago
    > Or over tens of millions of years would more naturally occurring easy to find veins of gold and silver rise to the surface of the Earth's crust? i am not a geologist but, as i understand it, plate tectonics cause a lot of "churn" in the crust. so i think it is certainly conceivable that a civilization could mine all the accessible veins to exhaustion but have many more veins brought up near the surface in the following 60 million years.
    • dustfinger 8y ago
      Yah, as I wrote my comment I realized that it made sense that there would be churn. I am not a geologist though. It is a fascinating notion. It makes me think of Mote Cook's Numenera http://numenera.com http://numenera.com
• hudathun 8y ago
  The Mediocrity Principle applied to civilisations would suggest we're not the 'special' first one here. We thought we were special in lots of ways that we've since had to abandon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle
• bitL 8y ago
  What if past civilizations exhausted their naturally reachable energy deposits, like we now do with oil, so we can't even guess what did they use as we won't find it on Earth anymore?
• mattnewport 8y ago
  Could something like Fort Knox survive as an unusually concentrated deposit of gold? On a larger scale, would a city like New York leave an area with an anomalous distribution of elements of a similar nature to what we see where there has been an ancient meteorite impact?
  • jlg23 8y ago
    If you look at it in just the right scale: definitely. The problem is to find the exact spot to look at. Even today, geo-exploration is mostly a joke: drill where experience tells us to. New hotness: Have AI do inference from formalized experience. There could be a thousand former fort knoxes or NYCs and we, with our methods, only have a snowball's chance in hell to find any.
• spullara 8y ago
  Me: "It would be amazing to go out to the asteroid belt and return a rare-earth metal rich asteroid to solve that problem once and for all." Other: "That's what the dinosaurs thought."
• BurningFrog 8y ago
  One strong argument against a civilization in the last 100 million years or so is that our separate continents have clearly been completely isolated, and gone separate evolutionary paths. If there was a planetary civilization 20 million years ago, there are tons of "invasive species" that would have spread across all continents then rather than in the 1800s. Think rats, sparrows, cockroaches, etc x 1000. I don't think I have an argument against one back in Pangean times though.
  • aalleavitch 8y ago
    What if it were a civilization of ocean-dwelling creatures? That would make the whole premise more plausible for a number of reasons.
• djsumdog 8y ago
  Would our roads would survive? Never before has humanity so dramatically changed the planet in such a fundamental way. Roads from older civilizations like the Romans and the Sumerians would probably erode, but our modern asphalt is pretty insane when you think about it. If left on the surface for millions of years, yes they would fade to nothing. But in many locations, they'd get buried in layers of swamp and sediment. Even if they shifted around via plate tectonics, many of our modern highway junctions are quite massive. With 7 billion people and the insane amount of infrastructure on our planet, surely some of that would survive if a future civilization started digging a few hundred meters through bedrock. How long before roads churned under the pressure of the earth into indistinguishable small pieces of rock? Would they be gone in less than a million years? As a side note, this makes me think about all the world that goes into nuclear waste burial sites, and how we're currently trying to create warnings that may need to outlast our civilization by millions of years.
  • greedo 8y ago
    Anything made of concrete would probably be gone in less than 1K years. Even granite slabs don't last very long...
    • credit_guy 8y ago
      What about the Colosseum? The Pyramids are also in quite good condition. And the ruins of Gobekli Tepe are more than 10k years old.
      • Udik 8y ago
        It seems to me that commenters in this thread keep taking the durability of materials under average conditions as a measure of what traces would be left after millions of years. By the same standards, we shouldn't have a single bone or trace that anything that lived more than a few hundred years ago. However, when there is a very large amounts of specimens, some happen to be preserved in exceptional conditions or undergo transformations which let them survive or leave traces, direct or indirect, for tens or even hundreds of millions of years.
• shams93 8y ago
  There's no real evidence for this in archeology. We would find little statues of these non humans. we have highly intelligent non humans like dolphins and octopi but they don't have the ability to make fire despite being extremely intelligent, flippers and tentacles are quite limiting.
  • api 8y ago
    Read the other posts in this thread. None of that would remain after tens to hundreds of millions of years.
• Tossrock 8y ago
  Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter briefly touched on this idea in The Light of Other Days. (Spoiler) The book is primarily concerned with the development of a miniaturized wormhole technology which allows remote viewing anywhere on Earth, and the effects this has on privacy, etc. They discover it can also be used to view backwards in time, and at the end of the book they trace the tree of life backwards towards the universal common ancestor, and discover that it was a microbe seeded deep in a geothermal vent by a civilization of intelligent trilobyte/arthropod like creatures, which knew its own extinction was imminent at the hand of a massive asteroid.
  • rapnie 8y ago
    Thank you!! I have been looking for this book in my own sci-fi bookcase a number of times having forgotten both author + title. Got it now :) This is a great book!
• aurizon 8y ago
  The nuclear war between the Dinosaurs and the Martian Kangaroos laid waste to both their planets 65 million years ago. The final phase occurred when the Martian forward base on the moon, from where they bombarded the earth, was wiped out by asteroidal bombardment by the dinosaurs. Then the Venusians moved in and finished the job, eliminated all the remaining dinosaurs and the Martian kangaroo people and retreated behind their cloud cover. A few 'roos survived, but retroevolved to a pastoral state. We had better tread with care - lest we anger Venus...
• ohiovr 8y ago
  Long lasting nuclear waste products could survive for a few million years that may have no natural occurrences.
  • candiodari 8y ago
    But there would only be, say 2000 sites of them. Each 10x10 meters in size, buried deep underground. Good luck finding them.
• bprugat 8y ago
  This article explains the discarded wrapper for Cocoa Glorfs I found dated Blorfna 37523.
• erikb 8y ago
  There are so many open questions out there. For instance, how do we know that the bacteria don't form an intelligent species, too? What if there's something else out there, that just is not intelligence but just like intelligence enables a life form to advance as far as we have and beyond? Even our understanding of the beginning of the universe is just a model, an idea. It's not like we have proof. From time to time it's quite important to remember how vast the knowledge is that we don't possess in contrast to the one we do.
• mdekkers 8y ago
  It’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don’t support. Come work in corporate IT, we do this all the time :)